ar
fancy, as a sort of Friar Bacon, a forerunner of the wizard Faustus; a
man whom Bernard of Clairvaux called a thief of souls, a rapacious wolf,
a Herod; a man who reveals himself a Pagan in his attempts to turn Plato
into a Christian; a man who disputes about Faith in the teeth of Faith,
and criticises the Law in the name of the Law; a man, most enormous of
all, who sees nothing as symbol or emblem (_per speculum in aenigmate_),
but dares to look all things in the face (_facie ad faciem omnia
intuetur_). _Facie ad faciem omnia intuetur_, this, which is the
acknowledged method of all modern, as it had been of all antique, thought,
nay, of all modern, all antique, all healthy spiritual life--this was
the most damnable habit of Abelard; and, as the letters show, of Heloise.
What shall we think, in consequence, of the intellectual and moral
sterility of the orthodox world of the eleventh century, when we find
this heretical man, this rebellious woman, arguing incessantly about
unrealities, crushing out all human feeling, judging all questions of
cause and effect, settling all relations of life, with reference to a
system of intricate symbolical riddles? These things are exceedingly
difficult for a modern to realise; we feel as though we had penetrated
into some Gulliver's world or kingdom of the Moon; for theology and
its methods have been relegated, these many hundred years, to a sort
of _Hortus inclusus_ where nothing human grows. These mediaeval men
of science apply their scientific energies to mastering, collecting,
comparing and generalising, not of any single fact of nature, but of the
words of other theologians. The magnificent sense of intellectual duty,
so evident in Abelard, and in a dozen monastic authors quoted by him,
is applied solely to fantasticating over Scripture and its expositors,
and diverting their every expression from its literal, honest, sane
meaning. And indeed, are some of the high efforts of mediaeval genius, the
calculations of Joachim and the Eternal Gospel, any better than the Book
of Dreams and the Key to the Lottery? Most odious, perhaps, in this
theology triumphant (sickening enough, in good sooth, even in the timid
official theology of later days), is the loss of all sense of what's
what, of fitness and decency, which interprets allegorically the grosser
portions of Scripture, and, by a reverse process, lends to the soul
the vilest functions of the body, and discusses virtue in the terms